Developers and IT-Pros usually start their Cloud journey by installing software on virtual machines. While this makes it easy to create running Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), it requires additional work to load data and develop a coherent business solution. Today we’re excited to announce a quick and easy way for the moderately technical user to get started with a pre-bundled visual analytics & big data solution running on Microsoft Azure: The Tableau/Cloudera Quickstart, built by Slalom.

To process and rationalize the large amounts of data produced in today’s modern businesses, users need flexible, sophisticated visualization tools combined with Internet-scale data processing clusters. As you may already know, Tableau’s Server is acclaimed for self-service data visualization and collaboration, whereas Cloudera’s Enterprise Data Hub (CDH) framework provides robust data management and processing. Numerous customers are deploying these solutions every day on Azure, and both solutions can be found in the Azure Marketplace.

As a way for our customers to quickly experience the power of Azure and the strengths of our market-leading partners Tableau and Cloudera, Microsoft teamed up with Slalom to develop a sample, integrated business solution. Whether you deploy for trial purposes, for a proof of concept, or a production environment, you can get started with this solution with very little configuration and setup effort. Simply follow the Quickstart Cloudera + Tableau Deployment Guide, and you will end up with a pre-configured, Azure-optimized cluster of VM’s running Cloudera CDH that is pre-loaded with data. This cluster will also contain a Tableau server VM that is pre-configured with a Tableau retail dashboard that allows you to work with and analyze the Cloudera CDH data.

The solution is designed to configure all the necessary components and the network topology, so you can focus on your data ingestion, management, analytics, and insights. If you have specific environment requirements or you prefer to customize the setup, you also have the flexibility to fork the repository, update the ARM Template and deploy the Cloudera with Tableau solution to fit your needs.

We hope this helps with your Azure journey with Cloudera and Tableau – and we are looking forward to your comments. Please feel free to reach out.

Explore other Azure Partner Quickstarts to push your Azure skills to the next level

Practical aspects:

(1) Licenses - Both Cloudera and Tableau solutions are provided as Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) model, as an initial free trial basis. These trials cover 60 days for Cloudera CDH and 14 days for Tableau server. After the initial trial period, you will need to reach out to the respective ISVs for licenses.

(2) Versions:

Cloudera CDH 5.4.x Apache Hadoop deployment on CentOS

Tableau Server 10.1 running on Windows

Acknowledgments

This article is a collaboration between several people. Special thanks to Nicolas Caudron and Gil Isaacs.